Dancing with Alicia Alonso
When Uruguay broke diplomatic relations with Cuba on September 8, 1964, Alicia Alonso, Cuba’s prima ballerina assoluta, was enraged. “Savages who resist a future no one can deny,” she cursed.[1]
Weeks before, 14 of the 18 members of the Organization of American States (OAS), at the request of Venezuela, had condemned the government of Fidel Castro and severed diplomatic relations.[2] Of the four OAS members that refused to break with Havana, Chile followed cutting ties on August 11, and Bolivia, ten days later. With Uruguay’s decision, despite the White House’s pressure, Mexico remained the only nation that refused to turn its back on Cuba. In public, Mexico announced that breaking with Havana would be a violation of Cuba’s right to self-determination. [3] The Johnson White House, privately, agreed that having the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City remain open would be useful.[4]
Why did Alonso, a ballerina who had, five years earlier, founded the Ballet Nacional de Cuba care?
*
Alonso had left Cuba for the United States in 1943. The American Ballet Theater had asked her to replace Alicia Markova, who had been injured, in Giselle. Three years later, she was promoted to principal dancer, performing in Swan Lake, Undertow, Theme and Variations, and Fall River Legend to critical acclaim. In 1948 she returned briefly to Cuba to launch the Alicia Alonso Ballet Company, which her husband, Fernando Alonso, managed, while she commuted between Havana and New York.
Europe beckoned in the 1950s; she performed Giselle in Moscow, at the Bolshoi, and the Kirov in Leningrad, plus with the Paris Opéra Ballet. (She is said to have performed for Joseph Stalin.) She danced at the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo from 1955 to 1959. Her reputation soared as the first Latin American ballet dancer to perform in Europe, paving the way for others, such as Mexico’s Elisa Carrillo Cabrera, currently the principal dancer with the Berlin State Ballet. Alonso became notorious during this time, however, when she rebuffed Batista. “I shall never dance in Cuba as long as you are in power,” she declared in an open letter.
Castro was still exiled in Mexico when Alonso publicly denounced Batista in August 1956. Castro returned to Cuba surreptitiously later that year. While still in the Sierra Maestra, she sent word to him, declaring that his Revoluciónmust move Cuba closer to European sensibilities and culture. “I was confident that something good and big would happen. … [B]efore the Rebel Army defeated the dictatorship’s forces, we sent the rebels in the Sierra Maestra, a far-reaching proposal of what ballet could become in the days to come. The bearer was a friend of ours and a great lover of dance, a very cultured and at the same time very revolutionary man, Dr. Julio Martínez Páez, who earned the rank of Comandante in the mountains.”[5]
Castro agreed. He sent word that his regime would back Alonso. Two months after he gained power on 1 January 1959, Castro provided $200,000 USD, the equivalent of $1,750,0000 of today, to transform the Alicia Alonso Ballet Company into the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. This stood in contrast to Castro’s contempt for Celia Cruz, the Afro-Cuban singer of international renown. Cruz planned to return to Cuba after a tour in Mexico ended in 1960. Castro, however, denounced her — and her music — to be “incompatible with the ideals of Revolución.” Castro refused to allow Cruz to return to Cuba. When her father, Simón Cruz, died in 1961 she petitioned Castro to attend the funeral. Castro denied her request. The following year when her mother, Catalina Alonso de Cruz, died, Castro again denied her request to attend her mother’s funeral.
Alonso, who was White, had done what Cruz, who was Black, could never do: strike a Faustian deal with Fidel. Within months of the triumph of his Revolución, Castro, a European-descended Cuban, made it clear that his overthrow of Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s first leader who was a person of color, was a “whitelash” against an increasingly diverse nation.[6] Within months of taking power, Castro’s purge of non-White Cubans was underway: Afro-Cubans could exist, but their purpose would serve the political ends, economic development, and cultural institutions of the Euro-descendant Cubans in the image of how Karl Marx, a dead angry white man from Trier, then a part of Kingdom of Prussia, promised.[7]
*
This, naturally, brings us to my cousin, Libia Cáceres, who danced under the direction of Alicia Alonso. This was possible because, as part of its policy of passive aggressive foreign policy toward Washington, D.C., Mexico subsidized lavish “cultural” exchange programs with Cuba. These programs offered an economic lifeline to Havana while giving Mexicans the illusion of being independent of Washington’s influence. This is how my cousin learned of a program that allowed Mexican ballet dancers to audition for a one-year scholarship to study with the acclaimed Ballet Nacional de Cuba.
I learned of her interest one day when I was visiting her family. Libia asked me if I could help her with her high school chemistry assignment. She was in the family study, her toy poodle by her side. (I disliked Fifi, a neurotic creature with red ribbons tied around her ears and her little canine nails painted crimson red. Fifi’s incessant barking made me want to gift Libia’s brothers a python.) Libia feigned frustration over chemistry. As I went over her homework, she told me about her interest in studying ballet in Cuba. “Doña Alicia es magnífica,” she said. She explained that scouts from Havana would be conducting auditions in town, but that her father was against her spending a year alone in Cuba. She asked if I could speak to him and voice my support for her wish to study ballet with Alonso.
When I spoke to her father, he said that, after much thought, he had already agreed despite his misgivings. She could go, he said, on one condition: that she be accepted into the program on the strength of her own merit. I knew this wouldn’t be an obstacle for her; Libia was talented. Her desire to study ballet in Cuba was neither an unrealistic pursuit nor vanity. She had another advantage that would prove irresistible to the Cubans: she wasn’t as unattractive or anorexic as Natalie Portman in Black Swan. My cousin was a tall, thin, gorgeous green-eyed girl. She also easily satisfied her father’s condition: when she performed for school officials the Consul of Cuba in Mérida hosted over three days of auditions, she was easily accepted.
When the time came, she was on a Mexicana Airlines flight to Havana.
*
There came a time a few months later when her father, Uncle Mario, was concerned about her. When I told him that I had been invited to travel to Havana, presumably to meet officials at what in Mexico was known as the Banco Internacional de Sueños Robados, the International Bank of Stolen Dreams, he asked that I drop by and check in on her.
When I arrived in Havana, I wasn’t surprised by the address where she was living. As Cubans were forced into exile and left everything behind, Castro seized their homes. It turned out that Libia, along with some of the foreign ballet students, was living in a gracious penthouse in a Mid-Century Modern apartment building in the Vedado District along Avenida de los Presidentes.
She was thrilled, she told me, about being in Havana. “Doña Alicia es un sueño,” she said, with genuine enthusiasm. We walked over to Victor Hugo Park to meet a couple of her friends, also foreign ballet students. In the conversation that followed, the three girls agreed that the one thing they found odd was that there were no Black ballet dancers at the school. “All you have to do is look around and you can see that gallegos are a minority,” Libia said. Gallego, or Galician, is Cuban vernacular for a Cuban born of European parents or grandparents. Her friends agreed.
They invited me to a rehearsal the following afternoon. They accompanied me to the nearby Sinagoga Centro Hebreo Sefaradí; I had agreed to drop off a cash donation from the Sephardic Jewish community in Mexico City to these destitute and abandoned people. When I returned to my hotel, after I escorted them back to their apartment building, I called Uncle Mario and assured him his daughter was doing fine.
The next day, I attended a rehearsal at the Cátedra de Danza. I did notice that, given Cuba’s demographics, almost all the ballerinas were gallegas. Neither Libia nor her friends dared to speak about the obvious; I suspect it wasn’t because they were bashful about speaking up, but their reluctance was fear. They were afraid that if they asked uncomfortable questions, they would be asked to return to their home countries. I was leaving the next day; I didn’t care about asking inconvenient questions.
When I was introduced to Cuba’s prime ballerina assoluta of consequence who refused to dance for Batista but went all out for Castro, I spoke up:
“Blacks don’t like ballet?” I asked her.[8]
She looked aggrieved. “I don’t care if they like ballet or not.”[9]
“I find that odd, don’t you?”[10]
Then, as if she somehow anticipated a more enlightened, progressive era when woke folk would walk the face of the earth, or at least plod across the tortured terrain of the United States, she described the idea of cultural appropriation before any American had even thought of such self-serving posturing to signal a self-satisfied snarky political posture.
“Ballet is an art that was born in Italy in the 15th century. From there, it spread across Europe. And it was in France and Russia where it became the art form we know it to be today. That is to say, it is a European art — of European origin, by Europeans, and for Europeans. Ballet has nothing to do in any way whatsoever with Africa or Afro-Cubans. It is a cultural expression of Caucasians and it belongs, as an art form, exclusively to Caucasians. From time to time, there is a mulatto of inate talent, but that only happens because of her European heritage.”[11]
Then she told me to stay out of the sun. “If you keep sunning yourself like an iguana, in a few decades you will be wrinkled like an iguana.”[12]
*
Libia Cáceres finished her year at the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. She was so promising that she was invited to stay on. She, however, could not countenance staying beyond that one-year commitment; Cuba had proved a disappointment. She returned to Mexico and in due course fell in love and married. She had two sons who are now fine young men. Alonso continued to run the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, becoming a myth in the process, but it was unsure what kind legend.
Detractors, my cousin included, mentioned that Alonso had stayed on too long. “She was vain and a control freak that way, unable to let any other Cuban ballerina shine,” my cousin said.
When Alonso died, my cousin and I spoke about that extraordinary year she spent in Havana. “I still think of those days and evenings when there I was studying with Doña Alicia!” We agreed Alonso had become a marginalized relic in the ballet world, a living dinosaur. “Do people in New York even remember who she was?” my cousin asked. Very few people, I told her. Then I mentioned that even when a commentator in the United States had wanted to pay Alonso a tribute, she failed.
“I laughed when Neda Ulaby praised Alonso on National Public Radio and the moron couldn’t even say ‘Alicia’ properly,” I told my cousin. “You live your life like a committed White Supremacist in the name of Marxism with such flair and devotion, and reporters in New York can’t even pronounce your name properly.”
“Not even when they want to be kind, American progressives are uncouth,” Libia answered.[13]
We laughed.
*
In 1941, Alonso was diagnosed with a detached retina. Surgery to correct this was not successful. She suffered from partial blindness that progressed as she grew older. In 1998, to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, Castro praised her dedication and resilience: “I never forget what you told me one day about how, with your eyes closed, your ear allows you to follow the ballet, attuned to the slight tread of the shoes.”[14]
Castro died thirteen years later. Alicia Alonso continued on as her world became enveloped in shadows and darkness. When she died October 17, 2019 at the age of 98, Cuba’s sole prime ballerina assoluta had become completely blind in every way that a person can be blind.
[1] “Salvajes quienes niegan el futuro que nadie puede negar.”
[2] Venezuela accused the Castro regime of having smuggled munitions into Venezuela in a bid to destabilize the country.
[3] Canada, which was not a member of the OAS, also refused to break diplomatic relations with Cuba.
[4] Mexico City is a center of regional spying; Cuba, Russia, and Iran maintain robust diplomatic missions, as does the United States.
[5] http://en.granma.cu/cultura/2019-10-24/the-incredible-is-to-have-done-so-much-in-such-a-short-time.
[6] See, Halperin, Ernst. Fidel Castro’s Road to Power. Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Research Project on Communism, Revisionism, and Revolution, 1970.
[7] Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a European-descendant Argentine, satisfied his racist impulses by overseeing revolutionary “tribunals” where, disproportionately, Black Cubans were executed by firing squads. Accounts, broadcast throughout Cuba at the time, encouraged an exodus of Black Cubans from the island nation. Newsreels are available for viewing on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogKBqxnaWhU&has_verified=1&app=desktop.
[8] “¿Y a los negros no les gusta el ballet?”
[9] “Si les gusta o no les gusta, no me importa.”
[10] “Me extraña.”
[11] “El ballet es un arte que nacio en Italia en el siglo XV. De ahí, se extendió a través de Europa. Y fue en Francia y Rusia donde se realizó como el arte que hoy en día conocemos. Es decir, es un arte europeo — de origén europeo, por europeos, y para europeos. El ballet no tiene nada que ver en ningún sentido con África o afrocubanos. Es una expresión cultural de los caucásicos y pertenece, como arte, exclusivamente a los caucásicos. De vez en cuando, hay una mulata que le nazca, pero eso solo ocurre por su herencia europea.”
[12] Si te sigues asoleando como una iguana, en unas décadas estaras arrugado como una iguana.
[13] “Ni hasta cuando quieren ser amables, los gringos progresistas son toscos.”
[14] “Nunca olvido lo que me contaste un día al oído sobre lo que te permite seguir el ballet, con los ojos cerrados, por las leves pisadas de las zapatillas.” See: https://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2013/05/07/cultura/1367916843.html
